Images on the noisy side. Bulky and awkward design for a phone. Only midrange CPU and gaming performance.

Bottom Line

The Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom is an interesting hybrid Android smartphone and camera, but it won't be a practical replacement for both devices for most people.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom ($199.99 with 2-year contract) is a camera phone in the truest sense of the word—it's literally a point-and-shoot camera grafted onto an Android smartphone. AT&T would have you believe that with the S4 Zoom "you don't have to compromise," but like many hybrid tech devices before it, the S4 Zoom makes inevitable concessions as both a camera and smartphone. Its 10x optical zoom is unrivaled in the smartphone world, but its image quality and low light performance don't justify the bulk when compared with options like the Nokia Lumia 1020.

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Design, Features, and Call QualityIf you thought the Nokia Lumia 1020 looked ridiculous, then you're in for a treat. From front and center, the S4 Zoom looks like a shrunken down Galaxy S4, complete with gently rounded corners, oblong Home button, and faux-chrome trim around the edges. Flip it over and it looks like a shrunken down Galaxy Camera, or really most any point-and-shoot camera.

At 4.94 by 2.5 by 1.06 inches (HWD) and 9.9 ounces, the S4 Zoom is bulky and hefty for a smartphone and still a bit thick compared with typical point-and-shoots. It felt as alien and unwanted in my pocket as oversized phablets like the Samsung Galaxy Note 3. There's a decent handgrip on the back with an extending lens surrounded by a plastic, rotating lens ring. The two bulges on the backside are great for cameras, but make the S4 Zoom awkward to use as a phone. On the right side (when looking at the phone screen in portrait mode), you'll find Power, Volume, and Shutter Release buttons. The left side houses a microSD card slot and a tripod mount, while a micro USB port and battery port are on the bottom.

The 4.3-inch, 960-by-540-pixel AMOLED display is reasonably sharp, with 256 pixels per inch, and the ultra-saturated colors will be appealing to some. Viewing angle is solid, but maximum brightness is on the lower end, which makes outdoor use a bit troublesome—you can still see it fine, but framing your shots or confirming focus could prove problematic in bright direct sunlight.

The S4 Zoom supports AT&T's 3G UMTS (850/1900/2100MHz), GSM/GPRS/EDGE (850/900/1800/1900MHz), and LTE (Band 2, 4, 5, and 17). I tested the S4 Zoom in New York City and found reception and call quality were both above average. The earpiece gets plenty loud and is easy to hear over outside noises, and transmissions through the mic sound very clear and full, but voices did have a robotic edge to them. Noise cancellation was great in my tests, as the beeping of a truck backing up was imperceptible on a test call. Network speeds were on par with other devices I tested, though I did notice that the S4 Zoom took a bit longer to latch onto faster LTE. The S4 Zoom, like the regular S4, was able to complete a call from the basement of our office, where service is very spotty. The 2,300mAh battery was good for 12 hours and 58 minutes of continuous talk time in my tests.

Android, Performance, and MultimediaAs with any Samsung Android device, the S4 Zoom uses the company's heavy handed TouchWiz skin, here running over Android 4.2.2. Aside from the previously covered camera features, the software on the S4 Zoom will be familiar to anyone who's picked up a Samsung Android device in the past two years. Despite using a somewhat underpowered dual-core 1.5GHz Samsung Exynos 4212 processor with 1GB RAM, everything feels pretty fluid with the S4 Zoom. Animations and transitions render smoothly and the system felt responsive under normal load. Still, the S4 label here is a bit deceptive—app load times aren't all that brisk and intensive games like Asphalt 8: Airborne don't run nearly as smoothly on the S4 Zoom. It's decidedly midrange, but competent for the majority of tasks.

Out of the box you get 11.29GB of storage, and our 64GB microSD card worked fine as well. Media support is comprehensive, as the S4 Zoom had no trouble playing all of our test files, including DivX and Xvid videos at resolutions up to 1080p.

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About the Author

Before joining the consumer electronics team at PCMag, Eugene worked at local news station NY1 doing everything from camera work to writing scripts. He grew up in Montclair, New Jersey and graduated from the University of Virginia in 2010. Outside of work Eugene enjoys TV, loud music, and making generally healthy and responsible life choices.

Senior digital camera analyst for the PCMag consumer electronics reviews team, Jim Fisher is a graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he concentrated on documentary video production. Jim's interest in photography really took off when he borrowed his father's Hasselblad 500C and light meter in 2007. He honed his writing skills at re... See Full Bio

Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom (AT&T)

Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom (AT&T)

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